The shading curtain is being deployed… If you open it by the end of this week, it is virtually complete
The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched on the 25th of last month, is currently carrying out the most dangerous space deployment, but it is reported that “everything is going perfectly and smoothly.”
According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Associated Press, the Webb telescope is a tennis court-sized (21 × 14 m) five-layer shading film that blocks sunlight on the 3rd (Eastern time) by pulling the outermost film taut and fixing it. The job was completed in about 5 hours.
This light-shielding film is the largest and thickest of the five-layered light-shielding films made of polyimide ultra-thin film by receiving sunlight as it is.
It takes two more days to secure the rest of the shading film taut and form a perfect shape.
The Webb telescope, which observes the universe by sensing heat with infrared rays, can only perform as the largest and most powerful telescope ever in cryogenic conditions. do.
“Everything is going perfectly and smoothly,” Amy Law, chief engineer at Webb Telescope’s prime contractor, Northrop Grumman, told the Associated Press.
Project manager Bill Oaks said, “I don’t expect the drama to unfold (for the next few days),” said project manager Bill Oaks.
He explained that there are as many as 344 hurdles that can make the telescope unusable if even one goes wrong in the process of space deployment and deployment of the Webb telescope.
After fully unfolding the shading screen, the Webb telescope unfolds the secondary mirror support and then unfolds the hexagonal mirror of the main mirror folded three on each side to obtain a complete shape.
The Webb telescope continues to fly and enters the orbit of the second Lagrange point (L2), which is about 1.5 million km away from Earth, where the gravity of the Sun and the Earth is balanced at the end of January. After that, we will start to observe in earnest.
The astronomy community expects that the Webb Telescope, which is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope, which produced many achievements, will be an opportunity to reshape our understanding of the universe by looking into the first-generation galaxies in the early universe 13.5 billion years ago.
The Webb telescope was initially expected to operate for about 10 years, but the fuel efficiency was better than expected, so officials said that the observation activity would be continued for more than 10 years.
/yunhap news